<?php
/**
 * <https://y.st./>
 * Copyright © 2019 Alex Yst <mailto:copyright@y.st>
 * 
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 * MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
 * GNU General Public License for more details.
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 * along with this program. If not, see <https://www.gnu.org./licenses/>.
**/

$xhtml = array(
	'<{title}>' => 'I guess we have vultures here.',
	'takedown' => '2017-11-01',
	'<{body}>' => <<<END
<img src="/img/CC_BY-SA_4.0/y.st./weblog/2019/07/10.jpg" alt="A vulture in the city!" class="framed-centred-image" width="800" height="480"/>
<section id="diet">
	<h2>Dietary intake</h2>
	<p>
		For breakfast, I had 57 grams of cereal and 169 grams of soy milk.
		I had two small burritos for lunch.
		They were fast food burritos, and I&apos;ve been avoiding fast food, but these weren&apos;t too terrible, health-wise.
		Besides, I&apos;ve shown great improvement in my girth.
		I&apos;m not where I want to be just yet, but I think I can safely relax a little bit when it comes to what I eat.
		For dinner, I had 170 grams of muffuletta.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="drudgery">
	<h2>Drudgery</h2>
	<p>
		My discussion posts for the day:
	</p>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			Like you said, Web-based applications can be updated remotely.
			I&apos;d say that that&apos;s their biggest strength.
			Remote updates mean that users aren&apos;t having to constantly install updates to see your latest content.
			Cross-platform compatibility is another major feature that you brought up.
			But like you said, the hardware available to client machines is a bit all over the map.
		</p>
		<p>
			I&apos;d have to disagree with you that websites have to be inconsistent in how they render. One of the keystones of a good Web developer is that they can make the website render consistently across devices.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			I was unaware that the alpha channel could be used to hid an image within an other image.
			How does that work?
			Any use of the alpha channel is going to cause transparency in the visible image, which would immediately reveal the hidden image.
			For example, if the alpha channel were set to a grayscale representation of a second image, that second image would be plainly visible to people looking at the image as a whole.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
</section>
<section id="vulture">
	<h2>Vulture</h2>
	<p>
		While I was out biking today, I came across a vulture in the middle of the road, eating some roadkill.
		That was pretty much the highlight of my day; I don&apos;t often get to see vultures.
		I think I saw one on someone&apos;s roof a while back, but other than just that one, I can&apos;t remember another time I&apos;ve actually seen one of these birds.
		I guess they live in this city?
		Or maybe just nearby.
		I always think of vultures as desert birds though.
		It doesn&apos;t help that I almost never see them here, outside the desert.
		I wasn&apos;t the only person gawking at it, either.
		None of us tend to see vultures in these parts.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="Minetest">
	<h2>Minetest</h2>
	<img src="/img/CC_BY-SA_3.0/minetest.net./weblog/2019/07/10.png" alt="A dam to keep back the ocean" class="framed-centred-image" width="1024" height="600"/>
	<p>
		I complained about the game&apos;s $a[RNG] not being favourable yesterday, but after getting thuroughly frustrated today, I noticed a pattern.
		Some spots that I wanted to have dirt with snow were getting dirt with coniferous litter over and over while some spots I wanted dirt with coniferous litter were repeatedly getting dirt with snow, but in both cases, the patches were to the north of the dirt type I didn&apos;t want them to have.
		Things seemed to be spreading to the south.
		I tried using that to my advantage in a small hole though, and found the dirt type spread the wrong way, no matter whether I anticipated it spreading north or south.
		I didn&apos;t seem to be able to win on on that patch.
		So I opened up a creative world and started experimenting.
	</p>
	<p>
		I found that one hundred percent of the time, if I laid out a flat experiment with the dirt types on the same <var>y</var> value as the bare dirt, the bare dirt inherited from the node directly north of it.
		The dirt types spread due south.
		However, if the spreading dirt types are instead one node higher or lower than the bare dirt, the bare dirt instead inherits from the node west of it.
		The dirt types spread east.
		Every single time.
		It&apos;s the weirdest thing.
		If there are dirt types above, below, and on-level with the bare dirt, the bare dirt will inherit from tone on-level with it and will ignore the dirt types above and below.
		I didn&apos;t keep going to find the full priority order, but repeated experiments that always had the same results made it exceedingly clear that none of this was random.
		There&apos;s no $a[RNG] involved.
		Also, due to the shape of the hole in my actual world, it&apos;s completely impossible to get the dirt pattern I want without jumping through hoops such as mining away the stone, then cooking cobble later and replacing the stone, which I&apos;m not doing.
		So I moved the tree-planting spot over by one node.
		That got a working pattern.
		The area I&apos;m working with is oddly-shaped, so I can&apos;t make perfect use of the space anyway.
		Moving the tree over by one metre honestly won&apos;t make a difference in how effectively I can use the space.
	</p>
	<p>
		I&apos;ve mined away the sand I initially planned to, but due to the liquid physics of this game, the water can&apos;t spread and fill in the lower area unless I take a bucket and manually move water into place.
		Rather than wait until I have iron with which to build a bucket, I&apos;ve put up a dam on either side of the area, allowing me to go a bit below sea level, though not by much.
		One of the dams needed to go right where the support beams for the bridge were planned to be, so I erected the support beams and built them into the dam itself.
		The bridge will be up above the dam, sort of working with the dam to mark the area off from the sea visually.
		With the area now dry, I mined away even more sand, sand that was initially planned to be submerged.
		I realised many hours later, while I was out biking, that I&apos;d miscalculated the locations of the bridge&apos;s support pillars, due to not accounting for the fact that I was at negative coordinates and I&apos;d planned to use a mirrored pillar placement on that side of zero (or technically, on that side of 7.5, which is my mirroring point).
		I debated about ripping out the pillars and placing them where they belong, but I really didn&apos;t want to.
		It&apos;d be a lot of effort that I could instead put toward mining, or something.
		By the time I got home, I&apos;d managed to rationalise that the incorrect placements were somehow &quot;better&quot; though, so I&apos;ll leave them where they are.
		I&apos;ll need to alter my design though to keep the reflection about the origin, and if I mess up on the other side now too, one side&apos;s pillars <strong>*will*</strong> need to get ripped out and moved.
	</p>
	<p>
		I&apos;ve started a small mine, and I&apos;ve now actually got iron to work with.
		I don&apos;t need to use that obnoxious corpse-based storage system any more!
		By design, you can only loot items from a body, never give items <strong>*to*</strong> a body, which makes using corpses for storage  bit of a pain.
		With chests though, you can add and remove items at will.
		There really is no replacement for a good chest.
		I&apos;m going to need a lot more iron - and a lot of mese - before I can get off the island though.
		I&apos;m building powered tracks atop my bridge, so I can only go as far as the iron and mese take me.
		Also before I leave the island, I need to find enough dirt underground to bring to the surface and cover the stone with.
		I want to leave the island better than when I found it, in case I ever come back.
	</p>
	<p>
		I debated back and forth as to how the structure of my mine should be.
		There&apos;s got to be a way into it, as well as out of it, and building such infrastructure makes things complicated.
		If I later change my mind as to what would be most effective, the easiest thing to do would be to start an entirely new mine and abandon the old one.
		And that would be progress lost.
		I came up with an ingenious system though.
		It&apos;s ingenious in its effectiveness, but also in its simplicity.
		If you know anything about how I play games, I tend to grind for something.
		It&apos;s not always what you&apos;d think, either.
		For example, in an $a[RPG] that allows you to store up to some number of every item, I might grind to try to fill the bag.
		That&apos;s pretty much how I used to play Minetest, too.
		I measured my progress based on how many minerals were in my treasury.
		With <code>minestats</code> though, I can instead grind for drop points, and with <code>minestats</code>&apos; new levelling mechanic, I can grind for levels.
		You can be that I&apos;m not going to be satisfied just storing, throwing out, or even building with nodes that could have given me a drop but didn&apos;t, such as leaves and gravel.
		I&apos;ll keep them around, and eventually grind them down into the drops I&apos;m after.
		I&apos;ve already got over two full chests of nodes I need to get drops from, and I&apos;ll be getting all my drops before I move away from the island.
		I&apos;ll probably leave everything behind, save for what I can carry in one trip, and mostly start over, so all those drops will need to be acquired and left in the chests in that location instead of being left as a chest full of nodes.
		So I&apos;ve built a mine shaft straight down.
		To get back out, I stack some node I need to get drops from, and to go back down without taking fall damage, I dig those nodes back up and get drops from several of them.
		It&apos;s such a simple system, which saves me effort in trying to build and strategically place stairs or ladders, but it&apos;ll also save me effort later on, as I won&apos;t have as many nodes to grind drops from later.
	</p>
</section>
END
);
